Keep cloning them from the same DNA sequence for zoos and such? Wildlife that's threatened by extinction because of us is fine, reintroducing wildlife that died out many thousands of years ago due to natural selection seems like an overall bad idea. Despite there being cave paintings of them, there's no place on current day earth where they belong in the natural environment. And even if we could set up such a preserve it'd have to be huge to function.

How about denying medical insurance coverage to those that fail to get vaccinated, unless they can demonstrate that they are a member of a recognized religious congregation that specifically is against vaccination as a part of church dogma?

No. I'm sorry, I don't see this as a valid excuse. Freedom of religion has gone too far; if you can't properly take care of your kids, they should be taken away from you.

You're of course technically correct, as long as you run a plain X application. Which is xterm and.... what? Nothing that uses KDE, Gnome, wxWidgets or any other form of toolkit from the last 15 years at least. If you talk about remoting anything that actually looks like a GUI there's a 99.99% chance it won't be network transparent, but if you cover your ears and chant "xterm" real loud you can ignore that. And if xterm is all you need you might as well use plain SSH, it's basically SSH with a server drawn border instead of a client drawn one.

That's complete claptrap. Yes, very recent (last 5-10 years) widget toolkits have started to force use of features that result in bitmaps being sent across the network, but that's hardly a reason to throw out X. And it's essentially a lie to pretend it means, somehow, that X11 doesn't have network transparency.

I find it pretty bad, to be honest, that the same devs who are protesting that X11's network transparency isn't what it could be are:

1. The devs that did this in the first place, refusing to advance the protocol to include the features that GTK3 et al required.
2. Apparently think the solution is getting rid of network transparency altogether.

I'm staggered, to be honest, by the whole thing. I appreciate old code is sometimes awkward to support, but the solution isn't a wholesale replacement of the project. Mozilla's developers may have made many mistakes in their decision to throw out the Netscape code that delayed the release of a great browser for many years, but they were NEVER, NEVER so stupid as to say "Well, we looked at the Netscape source code, and we think the solution is to get rid of HTML. It's too kludgy! I mean, just look at it, it's impossible to add features to it cleanly!"

If we were talking about a rewrite of X.org, nee XFree86.org, nee X86, that'd be one thing. It's probably necessary by now although I'd still say they need to seriously think in terms of refactoring the project. But throwing out the entire protocol because they refused to add the features necessary to make the protocol efficient? Fuck that.

It's hard to see why anyone with an interest in Linux would want us to move away from X11 to an unstable untried display system that will be missing features by design, simply because some X11 developers feel that the core X.org server has a lot of cruft in it.

Wayland will look elegant to those programmers until the day they start adding the missing features. It'll be far more crufty and inefficient than X.org long before it ends up being feature complete. That's how programming works.

Again, this should all be covered by the company that wins the bid. If they don't like it, they shouldn't bid on the contract.

>because most of the requirements are out of date,

Contractor's fault. If the requirements are impossible, tell the customer and don't bid.

>were written by somone who had no idea what they were asking for

Same as above.

>or are missing critical pieces of functionality or details.

Same as above.

>Then you find out you need to integrate with a 35 year old Wang mainframe that runs some weird esoteric algorithm that no one alive understands.

If that's in the contract you signed, you need to do it. If it isn't in the contract, don't do it, or re-bid for that portion.

This would all be much simpler if both parties simply adhered to the terms of the contract. If the terms are unrealistic or impossible, don't bid.

"Mutual of Osama is people you can 'count on' when the going's tough"

Now, I never claimed the Vatican was not a business. I went to my church's business meeting Sunday night, in fact. You're attempting to shift the question off of what the Pope legally, personally owns, and whether or not there is power other than temporal wealth.

I'm sure you're only observing, and neither approving, nor suggesting alternatives.

You make winning the last two Presidential elections sound like a bad thing.

A presidential car would never, ever under normal circumstances be allowed to run close to empty. It must be able to drive the President around all day and still have the range for any emergency that might occur at the worst possible moment and where boarding a helicopter or plane to get out of there is unsafe or unavailable, the nearest safe haven far, far away and getting out to swap cars totally out of the question. Yes, it weighs 20000 pounds and gets 8 MPG but one gallon is about 6 pounds. My guess is that it has a 50-100 gallon gas tank, 300-600 pounds for a 400-800 mile range is still less than half of the Model S's 1200 pound battery pack and I'm sure they always keep the tank over half full. By comparison the Tesla would have to drag around literally tons of batteries. Long, single haul emergency drives is pretty much the worst possible case for an electric.

...but we'll continue paying for it here I suspect. That doesn't mean I'm happy about it.

The problem with privatization is that it ends up being worse than having the government do it directly, because there's no consequences for failure. Several companies bid on the project, but they low-ball the bid to win the project because the lowest bidder almost always wins. But then the project costs much more, and somehow the government is on the hook for these cost overruns, instead of the contractor being responsible (since they did, after all, bid a certain amount). The problem here is the government agrees to contracts which allow enormous overruns at the government's expense. If the contractor fails, what's the penalty? At worst, they get dismissed (and keep all the cash) and someone new takes over.

It's simple: make the bids binding, and if the contractor fails to meet the terms, they pay to get it right, and if they can't, they forfeit their company and the officers are all personally responsible.